given the recent case in the media of
http://techcrunch.com/2010/05/10/man-found-guilty-after-twitter-joke-about-blowing-up-an-airport/ , i don't think stuff like this looks particularly clever.
Someone must know where he lives? Tell ya what, Ill give an extra £100 into the pool if somone takes a nice big cricket bat and make sure he sucks his food through a straw for the rest of his days.... That would bring a big smile to my face....
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i'm in the city tomorrow, and part of hopefully a new exchange being set up. its going to be an interesting day
. i know i have many detractors, and many people who try to shout down my opinion (same as happened to arbboy on here?), but tonight i have felt more and more uncomfortable about hearing of this case. i spoke to blatch today and find it appalling that after a number of inter-account money dumps, probably breaking money laundering rules, and a seeming £120,000 grimming scheme, the total input so far from betfair has apparently been a phone call to say "some people have been trying to log into your account/guess your password". if that is true, then seriously what on earth is going on?
Imagine you are a ten year old kid, and your twin brother smashes your piggy bank, and takes all the 2p coins to the local fair. At the fair is one of those 2p machines, where you put your money in at the top, and hope that when it lands, it pushes lots of other 2p’s on the edge of the ledge in front of you, down into the ‘collect’ slot.
Those machines work, by not having many 2p’s on the ledge in front of you to start with, and despite having some payouts over the day, at the end of the day, there will be a build up of 2p’s.
The money your twin brother stole from you will end up sat there, and at the end of the day, the machine owner will collect maybe 30 to 40% of the 2p’s, so that the next day the process can start up all over again.
The thing is in this case, there is £120,000 of money that (seems) to have been lost. There is clear evidence with the paper trail of where much of this originally went, and about 8k paid in commission (apparently) on the bets on this account which actually won. There will also have been a similar amount of commission paid by the winning parties on the other side to Blatch’s losing bets.
I was in a pub many years ago with someone who was very well connected, who said he knew that the ratio of money paid out to winners on winning accounts by betfair, was about equal at the time to the amount of commission betfair managed to rake in. So for every £120,000 deposited, if that still held true, the exchange would get 60k, and 60k would go to shrewd accounts. Blatch’s bets may have generated around 16 to 20k of initial commission, but that money he lost to other accounts will also have been shuttled backwards and forwards, and re-raked many times.
The 120k has been lost. A fair estimate would be that about 60k of it will in the end end up in BF coffers (assuming all of it was lost on BF). My point is that there is a responsibility of the exchange, especially given that the money-laundering inter-account dumping seems to have been freely and repeatedly bypassed, to look after the welfare of the community. Almost nobody else on this thread has suggested that BF are in part at fault, for allowing the Blatch accounts to keep trading without ever getting a warning about breaking money laundering rules. If BF had been following money-laundering regulations, a significant part of the pot would not have been continued to be gambled and lost. In the end how much money was lost into the pot after money laundering regs were broken? Do BF have a vested interest, and have they profited, by ignoring requirements to not allow precisely the kind of behaviour which Blatch did actually engage in? Would the 120k of deposits been as badly depleted had BF stopped the trading? My guess is that he would have switched onto other exchanges, websites, casinos or whatever, and lost the money elsewhere, but the fact is, BF have profited from the misery of the 120k investors, by not enforcing money laundering regs. Is that not poor form?
BF have probably benefitted by about 60k from this scam. Its a horrible nasty story, which brings exchanges and the gambling community into disrepute. Is it any wonder why countries like Holland ban BF from operating there, after money-laundering regulations are treated as a bit of a joke? Why is BF’s first and only call to Blatch to warn him about multiple people trying to guess his password and log in on his account, and not one person at BF has called him to ask what the hell is going on? This is not organising a pishup in a brewery, this is about a genuine responsibility to protect people who are getting conned, and protecting the exchange itself from fraudulent activity. It would seem reasonable to have expected them to get on top of a £120,000 scam facilitated by BF, and to get on top of it quickly. Again, it seems that as the victims aren’t BF themselves, its just punters’ money, then its tough, and BF ends up trousering about 16k to 20k of commission directly, and probably about 60k overall of the victims’ funds. Is this really acceptable? I don’t think it is, but then again, perhaps i’m in a minority. Maybe they could put a little motto hanging over the front of BF H.Q. in Hammersmith, saying “who doesn’t care, wins”. 60 large as well
Just like those 2p’s are sat there in the machine, 60k of that 120k is also sat there in BF coffers. If I owned the 2p machine, and had a credible story told to me how one kid had stolen the others money, and put it in there, I’d give that kid the money back if I had the chance. If Blatch had taken a sawn-off shotgun into the local building society, nicked 10k, and then spaffed it away in a couple of days playing BF games/meteors or whatever, then if BF became conscious of where the 10k had come from later in the week, if it was sat in there accounts, would it not make sense to return it? Is BF a place where the victims of crime/con-merchants etcetera, can see their money dumped and ringfenced away from them?
If you provide these markets, if you don’t enforce money laundering regulations, if you pocket 20k in commission from these bets, and then probably benefit to the tune of another 40k as this money is then recycled between other customers, then given that there are people seriously hurt by this, its time to speak to Blatch, get a complete list of who is owed what, and return that 20k proportionately as 16.66pence in the pound, to people who have seen their money smashed away. It just isn’t fair for Bet-fair to have made 20k minimum out of Blatch’s victims, and BF should be trying to look for a way to end up having lost nothing through this, but also having not made a £20,000 minimum killing on it. Otherwise there is an incentive in the future to pressure whoever is supposed to be in charge of upholding money-laundering regulations, to allow dodgy accounts to keep betting. I doubt that is what happened here, my guess is just sheer incompetence from whoever was supposed to spot the money-dumping between accounts, but if it kept happening, it wouldn’t be a stretch to wonder precisely what orders were being given to the supposed money laundering team.
Make betting fair. (You know you want to really,....
)
dj
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Dont tell me this was all a fraud and there was no con 
But its a sad way that has led to ther being so much publicity